Now, at any cost, he was determined to see for himself. Nothing must stand between him and his duty. This was a man’s work. He decided that Eva must have no part in it; and so, a little later in the afternoon, when the fiercer heat of the day was waning, he left his locked room by way of the folding windows and took his way towards the forest. This time he went there with none of the vague terrors which had troubled him before: apart from a suspicion of shame in his deliberate secrecy, he had no misgivings. He was happy to find himself so firm in his purpose, thankful that the fever had left him free to meet this ordeal.
By the time of sunset he had reached the edge of the forest, in the very hour at which its life awakened. As he passed into its shadow he was conscious of this,as of a faint stirring in many millions of awakened leaves suddenly aware of his presence. In this he found nothing sinister. He was only filled with a wonder which had never come to him in moments less intense at the existence of these countless multitudes of green living creatures to whom the power of motion was denied. He was impressed with the patience and helplessness of vegetable life, seeing an aged and enormous tree strangled where it grew by the writhing coils of some green parasite. And yet it seemed to him that life must be far easier for a tree than for a man. A light breeze, herald of the evening, threw the plumes of the forest edge into tossing confusion. The ways of the wood were full of gentle sound.
And suddenly it was dark. He was on the edge of the nearest Waluguru village, the home of the mission boy, Hamisi. He did not want all the people of the forest to know of his errand; but blundering in the dark he found himself under the shadow of theirbandas, and seeing that concealment was useless, he entered the circle of the village. The sound of his step set up a small commotion among their goats, who were folded within abomaof thorns, but no human shape came to welcome him in the village. He went to the door of the headman’s hut, expecting to find the man M’zinga, who had stolen his chisel. But M’zinga was not there, nor any of the wives of M’zinga. And this struck him as strange; for only a little time before the youngest of these women had given birth to a baby, whom it was his ambition tobaptize. He tried another hut. All were empty. The village was empty and stank more foully than if it had been crammed with Waluguru. It was as if some plague had stricken its people, leaving nothing behind but the stench of corruption.
He pushed on. In a little while he came to the M’ssente river, whose crossings he now knew so well. By this time his eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom of the forest, so that when he came to the felled tree which served him for a bridge he was astonished at the amount of light which still lingered in the sky and its faint reflections cast upwards from that swift, dark water. Lingering here a moment, entranced by the sound of the stream and the glimpse of open sky, his eye was surprised by a sudden gleam of silver. It was the broken image of the new moon’s silver sickle. He raised his eyes to the sky in which that pale and lovely shape was rising. He watched her sailing upwards through the indigo air. And while he watched, it seemed to him that other eyes must have seen her. In the distance, over towards Kilima ja Mweze, he heard the throbbing of a drum.
At length he came to the village at which he had first surprised the devil dance. This, too, was empty, empty and stinking. He wondered why it was that Waluguru villages smelt so horrible at night. Where had the people of all these villages assembled? The words of Isaiah returned to him: “The new moons and sabbaths,the calling of assemblies I cannot away with.Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth.” And the baffling sound of drumsdrew nearer. On every side he heard the throbbing of drums. It was as though all the drums of Africa had been gathered together for this assembly. Every moment it seemed to him that the night grew more suffocating. He felt afraid of the darkness, as children are afraid. . . .
He had come to that thinner zone of the forest in which the terraced walks which had puzzled Eva began. And now it seemed to him that the wood was full of more than shadows. On every side of him, in the darkness, he heard the rustle of bodies moving through the leaves. He was conscious of the smell of the castor oil with which the Waluguru smear their limbs. Sometimes he heard the sound of heavy breathing and once or twice a laugh or a stifled cry. A terrible and bewildering experience. He could see nothing; and yet he knew that the darkness was crowded with men and women hurrying to and fro, who heeded him no more than if he had been a shadow, and were as intangible as shadows themselves.
Nor was this all; for it seemed to him that this atmosphere of hidden evil—for assuredly it was a devilish thing—aroused in him a curious excitement. It was as though there were in his composition nerve-endings of which his senses had never been cognisant, and his mind never master, which were responding against his will to these ancient and most subtle stimuli. He didn’t feel sure of the self of which he thought he had explored the utmost hidden recesses. Perhaps it was the hypnotic influence of the drums’monotonous rhythm; perhaps some special enchantment hidden in this darkness full of whispers and breathings and stifled cries. He understood now what the old writers had experienced when they invented a devil, an incarnation of the spirit of evil. He wanted to turn his back and run away from the whole adventure. He lay in the grass and prayed.
Thus fortified, he struggled on, climbing the zigzag path which skirted the Sabæan terraces. In the act of climbing he was happily less conscious of that populous darkness. In front of him many lights flickered through the trees. The noise of the drums grew very near. Suddenly, rounding a corner in the twisting way, he found himself on the edge of an open expanse, a wide shoulder of the hill, from which the light had come. For fear of being discovered he dropped down on his stomach in the grass. He slipped, and the blades at which he clutched cut his hands. In the middle of that shoulder of the hill stood the circular building of undressed stone which had astonished Eva on the night of her visit to the House of the Moon; but here there was no longer mystery or desertion; the open ground was crowded with black men and women. From his place of concealment in the spear-grass he could look straight through the gateway in the outer wall to the circular kiln which rose in the centre of the building. Here a fierce fire of wood was burning, the core, indeed, of all that buzzing activity. Towards it the men and women of the Waluguru, whom he had heard moving and panting in the darkness, were carrying bundles of dryfuel. They ran to and fro like the black ants, which the Swahili callmaji ya moto(boiling water), from the seething noise which they make when they are disturbed. Even so this welter of the Waluguru boiled and sweated; and to add to the fantastic horror of the scene, which resembled some ancient picture of a corner in hell, the flames in the central kiln crackled and flared, casting immense shadows from the black forms which leapt around them, flinging tongues of light to search the dark sky and lighten the swaying crowns of the forest trees. Sometimes, in this upper darkness, the vagrant lights would pick out the wings of pale birds that fluttered there. These were the doves which had nested within crevices of the walls.
But what most deeply filled the heart of James with dread was the expression of the faces of the naked men and women who danced about the flame. They were not the faces, the pitiable human masks of the Waluguru, but the faces of devils. He saw the transformed features of men whom he knew well: the mouth of the mission boy Hamisi, opened wide in horrible laughter, the red eyes of the headman, M’zinga. M’zinga was carrying the stolen chisel, waving it as his muscles twitched to the rhythm of the drums. He danced right up to the mouth of the kiln, then suddenly collapsed before it, hacking at himself with the sharpened edge till his legs streamed with blood. James could not see the end of this horror, for a company of sweating fuel-bearers from the depths of the forest swarmed before him, pushing the crowd to right and left. They threw the brancheswhich they had carried on the fire. There followed a hissing of sap, for the boughs were green, and a cloud of smoke spouted from the chimney of the kiln. At the crackling of the furnace the fuel-bearers shouted for joy, scattering in the crowd of women, some of whom they dragged away into the edge of the forest. The acrid wood-smoke made the eyes of James smart.
And now the furnace was so heated that the stones which lined it shone with a white heat. No more loads of fuel were brought to it from the outer woods, and though the drumming never ceased, it seemed as though the wilder ecstasy of the dancers had worn itself out. They lay stretched out, many of them, on the sandy ground in attitudes of abandonment and fatigue, their sweaty bodies shining like wet ebony. James noticed a thing which he had not seen before: a group of women, swathed in the black cloth, which the Waluguru affect, who had been sitting patiently on the right hand of the opening in the temple wall. The nearest of them he recognised as that slim girl the wife of the headman M’zinga; in her arms, held tightly to her breast, she carried her baby. From time to time she covered it with her black cotton cloth to shield its face from the scorching fire.
Already James had guessed what was coming. Standing at the side of the furnace door, he saw a tall man in white. He heard a whisper of the wordSakharani. . .Sakharani. In a moment another figure had leapt out into the light. It was the headman, M’zinga, still dripping blood from his most terriblemutilation. He pulled his baby from the arms of its mother. She clung to it, but the other women tore at her arms, and the rest of the Waluguru snarled. He held the child high above his head in the face of the furnace. The Waluguru shouted. For the moment the sacrifice of Ashtoreth was forgotten. And the white figure of Godovius was Moloch, the king.
WhenEva, resolved on confession, had come to the door of her brother’s room and knocked, she had not been altogether surprised at his anxiety to be left alone. James had always been like that, and she knew that there was nothing to be gained by disturbing him. Through the heat of that peerless afternoon she waited. But when the evening came and he had not yet emerged from his chosen solitude, she began to be more anxious. Even if he were in a state of extreme spiritual depression, starvation wouldn’t improve matters. It had always been a great part of her function in life to see that he was properly supplied with food and raiment and all the physical comforts which his spirit so heartily despised, and even in this extremity her thoughts moved in the accustomed channel. Seeing herself, as from a distance, pursuing these eminently practical affairs, she was even faintly thankful that she had still the distraction of her habitual activities. She went into the garden to find the boys. Onyango was there alone, sleeping in the sun. She woke him, and in a little while he returned, bringing with him a yellow gourd full of the thin milk of the country. She boiled a little of this over her fire of sticks, and took it to thedoor of James’ room. This time there was no answer. Perhaps, she thought, he was asleep. A blessed relief from all his troubles.
Two hours later she knocked again, and when, again, she received no reply, she suddenly took fright. She wasn’t afraid that he had done anything very desperate: she knew that his religious sense was too strong for this: but she knew that he was the lightest of sleepers, and his silence suggested to her a return of the illness which had robbed him of consciousness before. She remembered so well the ghastly sight which he had presented to her on that day, when he had laid on his back with his eyes staring at the ceiling, breathing stertorously. She listened carefully at the door, trying to hear if he were breathing like that now. She remembered her despair on that terrible night and the callous unconcern of Godovius, and her thoughts turned gratefully to M‘Crae. Now, thank heaven, she was not quite alone. She tried the door and found that it was bolted. The window. . . . It opened on to the stoep at the place where the great bougainvillea hung in thick festoons, mitigating kindly the whiteness of the light. At her passage a flight of nectarinidæ passed with whirring wings. The window stood open. The room was empty . . . that little room of James’, pathetic in its bareness, with no ornamentation but a cabinet photograph of old Aaron Burwarton and the coloured texts which James himself had achieved in his schooldays. On the table lay the open Bible and a sheet of paper on which James had scribbled texts. If she had looked up thereferences she might have discovered a series of obvious clues to the mystery of his new adventure. But she didn’t. She folded the paper and closed the Bible. She saw that he had lain on the bed, and even while she wondered what could have happened to him, she was smoothing the sheets and putting the creased bedclothes in order. She was only thankful that he was not ill. It didn’t so much concern her where he had gone; for it was a very rare thing for James to invite her confidence in his plans. Even at Far Forest he would often annoy her by an air of secrecy which emphasised his importance. So when she had put his room, that scene of so recent a spiritual anguish, in order, she sighed, and returned to the kitchen with her cup of milk.
All that afternoon she did not go to M‘Crae. Since the day on which Godovius had threatened her she had never been quite comfortable with him. She had felt an awkwardness which it was hard to explain: almost as if M‘Crae were aware of the character which Godovius had given to their relation. In some subtle way it seemed that the frankness of their first friendship had been spoiled. That was how she put it to herself; but the more probable reason for their awkwardness was the fact that he knew that she was excluding him from her confidence and would not say so. She would not admit to herself that she, more directly than Godovius, was responsible for the strained atmosphere.
In a very little while night fell. Still James did not come; and this seemed to her unusual, for the thornbush about Luguru is no place for a man to wander in at night. From her chair in front of their living-room window on the stoep she watched the rising of the moon. At that very moment James was crossing the M’ssente River. A beautiful slip of a thing she seemed to Eva, and of an amazing brilliance. Even before her shining sickle had floated above Kilima ja Mweze the sky was flooded with a pale radiance, and the outlines of the trees which climbed the sky-line and had already been merged in the soft darkness of the mountain’s bulk grew suddenly distinct. . . . Then the restless noises of the night began. Eva felt suddenly and rather hopelessly alone. She was not very happy in the dark.
Now she would not have to wait very long for James. No doubt, too, he would be hungry. She went into the house and laid the table for supper. After all, one must eat. On the table she placed a single lighted candle. Then she pulled on a pair of leather mosquito boots to protect her ankles, and sat there, waiting, and listening to the night. Far away in the forest she heard the sound of drumming. It did not bring to her mind the sinister suggestions with which it troubled that of James. But she felt unhappy, and, somehow, a little cold. She found herself shivering. And just as she had begun to wonder if she, like James, were on the edge of the inevitable fever, a strong-winged moth, hurling out of the darkness at her candle, put out the flame, with a noise of singeing wings, and left her in darkness.
It was a small thing, but it frightened her. Sherelighted the candle and settled down again to waiting for James; but now she found it more difficult than before to be self-contained. Indeed this culmination to her long day’s anxiety had been rather too much for her; she had tried too daringly to walk alone. The incident of the empty church, which at first had seemed to her no more than a set-back to be encountered, now returned to her with a more sinister suggestion. All atmospheres of that kind are more formidable by night: and this night of Africa, with its high and velvety sky in which the crescent moon was still ascending, seemed peculiarly vast, and alien in its vastness. All the time, from the recesses of the forest, she heard the beating of drums.
The little clock on the mantelpiece struck eight. The candle on the supper-table was burning down with a steady flame. James had never in all their life at Luguru been as late as this. It occurred to her that perhaps she was feeling nervous just for want of food. She decided that at the very worst she would not have to wait much longer, and that in any case it would be foolish to give way to her fancies. And then, at a moment when she was really feeling more secure, fear came to her, as swiftly and blindly as the moth which had blundered in out of the night, and all her bravery was extinguished. She left the light burning in the room and ran along the garden path to M‘Crae’sbanda.
“I was frightened,” she told him, quite simply. And then she told him of the surprise at the church that morning; of how James had left her and lockedhimself in his room; how he had left the mission and had not yet returned. And when once she had begun to tell him these things, and had heard his grave replies in a voice that was steady and devoid of fear, she began to feel lighter and happier. When once she had managed to talk like this she found it wonderfully easy to go on, and in a little while she had unbosomed herself of the whole story of her meeting with Godovius, his entreaties and his threats. Until she had ended he did not speak; but she knew that it was with difficulty that he heard her through. At the end he said:
“You should have told me. It would have been more like you.”
“I don’t know . . .” she said. “Perhaps I was ashamed. I think Iwasashamed. At the suggestion . . . you know . . . that we were anything but friends.”
He gave a short laugh. “I’m not laughing at you,” he said quickly.
“I know you’re not. It was silly of me. I ought to have trusted you. I wanted to. But I was shy, I suppose. And shocked by the mistake that he’d made. I was afraid that you might suffer because of his mistaken idea. And I was selfish. I couldn’t bear the thought of your not being here: and I thought that I could somehow wait until things cleared up. I thought I could just keep it to myself and hold on.”
“You were wrong. It never pays to put things off. No doubt it was a shock for you to have it taken for granted that I had made love to you. I wouldn’thave you worried by that. I suppose I am old enough to be your father. You mustn’t think any more of that.”
Quite candidly she said: “I won’t.” It was no more than he expected.
She sighed. “I am happier now,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much I have gone through in these days.” And then her thoughts returned suddenly to her fears for James.
“You must tell me what to do. I don’t feel as if I can do any more thinking. I’ve been such a failure when I tried to do it. I can’t think. I don’t believe I can feel. I’m not like a woman at all. I’m callous. No . . . I’m not really callous, but awfully tired. Oh, what can we do?”
“There’s nothing to be done in the night,” he said. “You don’t know where he went. In the night we are quite helpless. On the night when you found me it was just a matter of luck . . . a matter of Providence. When you get to my age you begin to believe in Providence. If you are lonely or frightened you had better stay here with me.”
“I’m not frightened now,” she said. “But . . . but I think I’ll stay here.”
M‘Crae made room for her on the heap of sisal beside him. They sat there for a long time without speaking amid the restless sounds which passed for silence in that night. In the remotest distance they heard the drums at Kilima ja Mweze. They were like the beating of a savage heart.
“I shouldn’t have kept it all to myself,” she said at last. “Are you very angry with me?”
He was a long time answering her childishness. “I couldn’t be angry with you. You should have known that. But if I had heard what he said to you I should have killed him. I couldn’t have missed him.”
“Then I’m thankful you didn’t.”
In the long silence which followed her tiredness gradually overcame her. It was no great wonder that in a little while she fell asleep. M‘Crae, lying beside her, felt her tired limbs twitch from time to time, as the muscles, conscious of the brain’s waning control, tried to keep awake. These feeble movements aroused in M‘Crae’s mind an emotion which was nearer to pity than to anything else. They reminded him of the helpless incoordinate movements which he had often seen in the limbs of young animals. He pitied her childishness, and loved it; for he had come to an age in which youth seems the most pathetic and beautiful of all things. Gradually this restlessness ceased. Eva sighed in her sleep, and the hand which lay nearest to him slipped down until it touched his bare arm. In its unconsciousness the action was as tender as a caress. He permitted himself to be conscious of the hand’s slenderness; but it seemed to him very cold. Gently, without disturbing her slumber, he lifted with his foot the blanket which she had lent him and pushed it over her. Then, lying still in the same cramped position, he settled down to think.
It was plain to M‘Crae from the noise of drumming which had filled the forest all that evening that some great festival was in progress at the Hill of the Moon. Lying awake in hisbanda, he listened to the sound. It accompanied, with its bourdon of menace, all the deliberations of that night. It was now evident to him that if a way were to be found out of Eva’s difficulties he must find it himself; and though he had fought his way often enough out of a tight corner, he had never been faced with a problem of equal delicacy. On the face of it, the matter seemed insoluble. In the first place, he could not count on James for any behaviour that was not admirably perverse. In any project of escape James counted for so much dead weight. Again, even if James should not return from his adventure on this night—and there was no reason to suppose that he would not do so—M‘Crae’s peculiar position as a man “wanted” by the German Colonial Government made it impossible for him to be a free agent. Here, as in most things, Godovius had the whip-hand, and however gallantly M‘Crae might have desired to play the knight-errant in the case of Eva, it would always be doubtful if her association with him could be of any use. It might even be better for her if he were to disappear, as a man with his knowledge of bushcraft might conceivably do, and leave her unhampered by his unfortunate association. But he couldn’tdo that. For if he left her, only James would remain, and of what use in the world was James?
Thinking the matter over coldly and with deliberation, he regretted that he had not been able to hear the shameful suggestions of Godovius on the evening of the rains; for if he had heard him he would assuredly have shot him where he stood, and the world would have been rid of another wild animal, as savage as any beast in the bush but without any redeeming dower of beauty. He would have shot him. There would have been another murder to his account. But this time he would not have needed to change his name, to lie hidden in an opium house or ship furtively under a strange flag. No . . . the matter would have been far simpler. He would have stepped out into the bush a free man, and then the vastness of Central Africa would have swallowed him up, him and his name. He would have trekked to recesses where no European could have found him. He would simply have disappeared. Perhaps he would have lived for many years: the M‘Craes were a long-lived race. Perhaps he would have died soon and in violence: it would have made no difference. The life which he would have led would not have been very much more solitary than his life had been for the last thirty years, except for one thing—the fact that he would be condemned to it for ever. And here, even though his love for Africa was so vast and varied, he found that there was more to renounce than he would have believed. For many years, as he had told Eva, the memory of his early life in Arran hadbeen nothing more to him than a memory: he had never really hoped to return to her misty beauty. But now, when he found himself faced by an absolute renunciation of the possibility of returning, he couldn’t quite face it. The sacrifice would be as final as death. For a short moment he was troubled by a vision of his ancient home: a day, as chance would have it, of lashing rain without and the smell of peat within. And he knew that if he did return he would have no more part or lot in the life of that remote island than a ghost revisiting the haunt of vanished love. For a little while the picture held his fancy: and then, imperceptibly, faded. The huge insistence of the tropical night, the high note of the cicalas, the whistling of the frogs rejoicing in the vanishing moisture of the rains, recalled him to the life which he had chosen, and he realised how imponderable was his dream. If he had killed Godovius that dream must have been surrendered. Very well . . . let it go. Even now it might be that he would have to kill Godovius . . .
He wished that he could smoke. Such meditations as these were less easy without tobacco. His tobacco hung in a yellow canvas bag at his belt, but his pipe was in his pocket, and in any case his hand was not free, for Eva’s fingers lay upon his arm, and she, poor child, must sleep. By this time his eyes were so accustomed to the dim light of thebanda, now faintly illumined by starlight and the beams of the rising moon, that he could see every feature of her pale face and the gloom of her hair. He had neverbefore been able really to see Eva’s face. In the daylight the candour of her eyes would have abashed him; he would not have dared to look at her eyes. Now he saw how much her beauty meant to him. If he should kill Godovius he would never see her again . . .
Against this final cruelty his spirit rebelled. It was not for nothing that he had been brought up in the hard creed of Calvinism. Here, even in spite of the new beliefs which life had taught him so bitterly, he found himself instinctively remembering the words of the Old Testament, and the brand of the murderer Cain, whose fate it had been to wander to and fro upon the face of the earth. So deeply ingrained in his mind were the teachings of his childhood that he was almost ready to accept this cruelty as justice: a kind of religious justice which decreed that if he were to save her loveliness from the defilement of Godovius he must relinquish for ever the one surpassing revelation of beauty which had crowned his wanderings.
Even so it seemed probable that he would have to kill Godovius. There was no other way out of it. At his side lay his rifle. The chambers were loaded with soft-nosed four-fifty bullets. He remembered the scandals which centred in the soft-nosed bullet in the Boer War. A bullet of that kind inflicted terrible wounds. That wouldn’t matter if only he shot straight: and there was no fear of his missing, for his rifle was almost part of his maimed body.
Eva stirred very gently in her sleep. She made astrange choking noise that was like a sob. M‘Crae’s fingers grasped her hand. He had never done anything like that before: but it seemed natural to take hold of the hand of a child who was frightened in the dark.
It was past midnight when the stillness of the night was broken by the sound of Africans grunting beneath a burden and the clatter of many tongues. In the front of the mission there was a great commotion and M‘Crae roused Eva from her sleep. Now that the game of secrecy was over there seemed to be no point in concealment; and Eva was far too sleepy to question what he did. They stepped out together into the pale night. The sky was very high and clear, but immense billows of milky cloud were ranged along the hill horizons, which in their huge whiteness overpowered the little earth. Beneath the stoep a crowd of Waluguru were setting up akelele. Most of them were naked and their polished skins shone in the moonlight. They swarmed like black ants about a piece of carrion, and the body which they had dragged from the forest to the mission was that of James, bleeding and torn by the thorns of the bush and smothered in red dust. Hamisi, who appeared to be in charge of the expedition, was loud and anxious in explanation.
“Hapana kufa. . . . He isn’t dead,” he hastened to tell them. Sakharani, he said, had sent him home. Hehad been found unconscious in the forest: even now he was unconscious, but breathing, and alive.
Now, at any rate, he had little chance of air, so completely was he surrounded by the sweating Waluguru. M‘Crae told them to go back to the forest. Already Eva was kneeling at her brother’s side, while the boy Hamisi, pleased with the importance of his mission, grinned and repeated the words: “Hapana kufa. . . . Hapana kufa. . . . He isn’t dead.”
He wasn’t dead, but, for all that, a very ghastly sight. His face was deadly pale and smeared with the blood that had trickled from a split in the skin above his right eyebrow. His right eye was full of blood. The blow must have stunned him fairly effectually, or else the rough journey would have awakened him.
“We must get him into the house,” said M‘Crae. He saw Eva help Hamisi to lift him and cursed his own maimed strength. It was beautiful of her, he thought, that she should consent to do such things. They lifted him and dragged him to his own room, and laid him on the bed. Eva brought a bowl of water from the kitchen and bathed his head. M‘Crae, miserably helpless, questioned Hamisi.
Bwana N’gombe (James), he said, had been found in the forest near Kilima ja Mweze. The cut on the head was nothing. Perhaps he had fallen against a tree. Perhaps a leopard had torn him. They had found him lying in the grass. Lying asleep. Even now he was asleep. Hamisi relapsed again into his monotonous “Hapana kufa. . . . Hapana kufa.”Perhaps he had gone to sleep for want of blood. Perhaps a devil had done it. He knew nothing whatever about it. He only knew that the man had been picked up asleep in the grass and that Sakharani had told them to carry him home. And here he was. Hamisi grinned, being satisfied that he had taken part in an excellent piece of work.
All the time that M‘Crae was questioning the Waluguru he had his eye on Eva. He watched the splendid way (as he thought) in which she suddenly adapted herself to the demands of the moment. Once again, as on the night when he had staggered out to waylay her, she was showing him her deft, practical side: the aspect which appeals most strongly to a man who has made a woman the vehicle of a tender ideal. It reminded him of that first night. It pleased him that it should do so, and so he kept Hamisi talking, and tried lovingly to recover the atmosphere of their first meeting, thinking: “You wonderful woman . . .”
He packed Hamisi off to bed in his smoky hole. He and Eva together stripped James of his torn and muddy clothes.
“You see he has been through the swamp,” he said.
It pleased him to find that he could use his arm with very little discomfort now, and the sense of helplessness which had lain upon him so heavily in thebandadisappeared. It was difficult to realise that he had led the life of a prisoner in a dungeon for a month. And Eva, too, was amazed at the help which he gave her, for she had grown to think of him asa helpless and pitiable creature. When she had started to undress James she had not imagined that the task would be so difficult. The weight of his unconscious body surprised her. A poor, thin creature, wasted by fever . . . he looked as though she could easily pick him up in her arms. But she couldn’t. Even with the help of M‘Crae it was a struggle.
“It’s no good wasting your strength,” he said. “You’d better slit up the sleeve.” So she went to her room and fetched a pair of scissors, and then M‘Crae found himself watching her slim, capable fingers again.
“I won’t leave you now,” he said, and was rewarded by her smile.
They sat there for a long time together, speaking in whispers, as if they were afraid of waking James, although, in fact, they were most anxious that he should wake. It was a very strange night for M‘Crae. Removed at last from the gloom of thebanda, it seemed to him that he had never really seen Eva before. In this light and spacious room she was quite a different creature from the gentle presence which had haunted his prison; endowed, in some way, with a more beautiful freedom of movement . . . more alive. More hopelessly unattainable. But it was ridiculous on the face of it that she should occur to him in these terms. He thrust the fancy aside obstinately, only to find it obstinately return. For why in the world should he not enjoy this brief interlude of beauty and light, seeing that in a very little time, a few days . . . perhaps a few hours, he himself must vanish altogether into a darkness from which he wouldnever emerge? For, without any doubt, he must kill Godovius. There was no way out of that.
At length, a little time before the dawn, when the night was at its coldest, James stirred in his bed. His hand uncertainly sought his bandaged head, and Eva very tenderly guided it downwards and laid it beneath the blanket. The movement was an immense relief to both of them. Neither of them spoke; and yet M‘Crae could see that a shadow had been lifted from her face.
And now James became increasingly restless. Once or twice he gave a groan of pain, and then a deep sigh, almost a sigh of content. He tried to lift himself up in the bed, though Eva gently restrained him. At last he spoke.
“I must have left it behind . . . in the church . . . it is so light.”
He tried to open his eyes. M‘Crae could see his brows wrinkling beneath the bandage. “Too light . . .” he said.
M‘Crae moved the lamp further away from the bed. His footsteps disturbed James.
“Who’s that? . . . There’s somebody there,” he said. “Oh, my poor head . . . my poor head.”
Eva laid her hand lightly upon his forehead. “It’s all right, dear, don’t worry,” she said.
For a little while he was contented; but then he said again: “There’s someone else in the room. . . . Who is it?Heisn’t here, is he?”
Even in this dazed condition he was typically persistent.
“There’s somebody there . . . who is it? You’re keeping it from me. It isn’t fair. Who is it?”
Eva’s voice trembled as she answered. She was listening to her own voice.
“It’s only a friend,” she said.
“A friend? . . . We have no friends.”
“A stranger. A Mr. M‘Crae. A hunter who was lost near here and came to the mission.”
There followed a long silence. She was dreading what would come next. To her relief she found that he was treating it as a matter of course.
He said: “Oh . . . all right. My head does ache so.”
For the first time Eva breathed freely. No doubt it was strange that she should be so relieved; but the difficulty which she had dreaded most in James’ awakening had been his discovery of M‘Crae’s presence. From the very first she had wondered how he would take it. She had feared that his peculiarly jealous regard for all strangers, a thing which he had overcome with difficulty in his youth, would be too much for him. The anticipation of this had been bad enough; but after her interview with Godovius, and his most hateful insinuations, she had felt that James would be almost justified in thinking the worst of her, and that she could have no defence to offer which wouldn’t sound like the flimsiest excuse. But the pain in James’ head asserted itself too cruelly for him to think of anything else for the moment. He accepted the presence of M‘Crae as nothing more than a curiosity, and the little that she told him seemed tosatisfy him. A little later, when his enhavocked brain began to clear a little, the horror of the night before, which had been mercifully forgotten, stole back again. Suddenly, as he lay there, with his hand in Eva’s, he was shaken by a fit of sobbing. At the best of times the sight of a grown man so tortured is terrible. And he was Eva’s brother. The one emotion with which she had habitually regarded him was that of pity. Now her compassion was overwhelming. She would have given anything in the world to be able to soothe him. He was clutching so hard at the hand in which his own had lain that he actually hurt her. M‘Crae saw her bending over James. He stepped through the open window out on the clammy stoep.
“You poor, poor dear,” he heard her say. “Is your head so bad?”
James spoke chokingly through his sobs.
“The pain’s nothing . . . nothing. I’ve only just awakened . . . remembered. Eva, I’ve been in hell. There can’t be anything worse in hell. I’d forgotten. Oh, my God, my God. I shall never forget again. My God. . . . My God . . .” And he started crying again.
She could do nothing with him. Her own helplessness amazed her. At times the storm of sobs would cease; but even then the light of his reason shone balefully. The words which he spoke were disconnected, and all were madly tinged with the remembrance of horror. Again and again he would say that he had been in hell, in the uttermost hell. And then his fancy would suddenly be taken with the idea offire. “Look,” he cried, “look, they’re bringing dry wood to the fire. The heat . . . think of the heat. . . . Seven times heated. Nothing could live. The stones are white-hot. Oh, God . . . God . . . can you see it?” Then he would scream: “They’re coming . . . they’re coming . . .” and clutch at his head and grip Eva’s hand; and she would grip his in her turn, as though the consciousness of her nearness and her strength might help his lonely spirit. Once, indeed, she found that he was stroking her hand. He had never done such a thing before, and the action brought tears to her eyes. But it was not Eva, of whom he was thinking. He said: “Mother . . . dear mother.” In a little while the violence and frequency of his fits of sobbing abated. He babbled less wildly, and fell at last, as she thought, into a state that resembled sleep. Indeed, she would have left him if his fingers had not been still clutching her hand. Thus they waited, until in the hour before their sudden dawn a rain-bird sang. The sound was doubly sweet to Eva, for she knew that the daylight was at hand, and in daylight she need not be so frightened. But with the dawn she heard another sound. And the sleeper heard it in his dreams, for he surprised her by leaping up in bed, with terror in his grey face. “The drums . . .” he said. “Do you hear them? The drums of hell.”
M‘Crae, walking up and down the stoep, and meditating on the strangeness of life, was aware of the drumming which ushered in the dawn. In the ears of James it awakened only memories of a recent terror; but M‘Crae, more deeply learned in the ways of Africa, knew that it portended something more than an echo of the night’s frenzy. The sound no longer centred in the villages about the foot of Kilima ja Mweze. It came to him from every point of the compass and from places where he had no idea that there were villages at all. The rhythm of the music, again, no longer followed the headlong triple time which had been beaten out by the drums of the N’goma. He noticed that the rhythms were broken and very varied: almost as if the hidden drummers were tapping a message in Morse or some other recognised code. The change filled him with a subtle anxiety: and in a little while he realised that he was not the only person whom the sound had disturbed. On the edge of the compound he heard African voices. Hamisi and Onyango and another M’luguru, a ragged savage whose business it was to herd the mission goats, were talking together in high-pitched voices. Determined, if he could, to find the cause of this excitement, heslipped across the compound under the cover of a hedge of young sisal, and saw that they were sitting in front of their shanty. The boy Hamisi was engaged in polishing the long blade of a Masai spear: and the word which emerged most clearly from their talk was the Swahili, “Vita,” which by an inversion of sense peculiar to Western ears has the meaning of “War.”
M‘Crae was troubled by this word, and, with it, the somewhat sinister occupation which Hamisi was enjoying. He knew all about war: the assegais of the Zulu, the Mauser bullets of the Boer snipers. Africa is a land in which that fire has never ceased to smoulder: he had always accepted it as part of the continent’s life. No more than that. He had never dreaded it; but now it seemed to him that in some way his attitude had been subtly changed. When he thought of war he began to think also of Eva, and to realise that for a woman native warfare includes terrible possibilities. Now, more than ever, it occurred to him that Destiny had brought him famished to Luguru to fulfil the part of a protector, for which she had already, brutally, almost disqualified him.
He wished that he could read the message of these disquieting drum-taps. Most probably, he thought, they announced some forlorn hope of a native rising already destined to wither before the German machine guns in the slaughter of black hosts. He knew the history of German South-West and the end of the Hereros. And he wondered—for he had lived so long in Africa that he knew the humble ideals of itsmillions—why these people should suffer our civilisation in the hail of Maxim fire. Yet, even while he indulged this vein of wonder and pity, he realised that a European community so small and so isolated as their little company at Luguru might very well be exterminated in the first outburst. In his years of wandering he had learnt that the best way of dealing with the African is to be direct and truthful. He stepped out into the path, and Hamisi, hearing his approach, pushed his spear into the hut and greeted him with a very charming smile.
“I have heard you talking of the war,” said M‘Crae. “And I have heard the drums say the same thing. What is this war?”
Hamisi smiled languidly, scratching his legs. “There is no war,” said he.
“But I have heard all that you said. And you were making ready a spear. You were not going to spear lions like the Masai. The Waluguru are not brave enough for that. You had better tell me.”
The idea that his lie had been taken for what it was worth seemed to please Hamisi. This time he laughed outright. If thebwanaknew that there was a war, he said, why need he ask questions? TheWasungu(Europeans) knew more about everything than the Waluguru. They only knew that there was a war, and that they were going to fight.
“And who are you going to fight?” asked M‘Crae.
Hamisi smiled, but said he did not know; and when M‘Crae had questioned him a little longer he became convinced that in this, at least, Hamisi was speakingthe truth. Somewhere in the world, somewhere in Africa—perhaps no nearer than the northern fringe of the Sahara—the smouldering flame of violence had flickered out. He did not know then any more than did Hamisi, sharpening his spear, that these angry drum-throbs were no more than the diminished echoes of the guns that were battering Liège.
He went into the house to find Eva. James, it seemed, had fallen once more into an uneasy and exhausted sleep. Even now his poor brain was haunted by the memory of the night’s horrors; but the watching had told so heavily on Eva that she thought she had better leave him for a little. M‘Crae found her in the kitchen making coffee for breakfast. She spoke in a whisper, as though she feared that her voice might be heard above the clamour in James’ brain. “He’s sleeping, or at any rate he’s stopped talking,” she said. She smiled quite bravely, but saw in a moment that some new thing was troubling M‘Crae. “What’s the matter now?” she said.
“I had wanted to keep it to myself,” said he. “I don’t think we need worry about it.”
“Nothing much worse could happen,” she said. “I think I could face anything now. What is he going to do?”
“It has nothing to do with Godovius this time . . .”
“Then why did you frighten me?” she said.
“It’s war . . . there’s a war somewhere. I don’t know where. In Tripoli, perhaps. The Waluguru know something about it; but I don’t suppose theyknow more than I do. I don’t suppose Godovius knows.”
When he first spoke she had gone very pale; now her colour returned.
“It was too bad of you to frighten me like that,” she said. “I thought you had heard something terrible about . . . him . . .”
They took breakfast together in the little room, and the atmosphere of that meal had a peculiar quality of lightness; as though, indeed, they had just weathered a violent thunderstorm, and were talking together in a silence which made their voices sound small and unreal. By the time they had finished their breakfast the sun had risen and filled the air with golden light. They stood on the stoep together gazing out over the newly awakened lands. Beneath the sun these lay in a vast and smiling lethargy. Thus would they awake to-morrow and for many weeks to come. Thus had they awakened for countless centuries before the ships of Sheba came to seek their gold. M‘Crae gazed fondly: there was no wonder that he loved Africa: but Eva was far less conscious of this revelation of beauty than of the presence of the man at her side. Neither of them broke the silence: but from within they heard the wailing sound of James’ voice, raised in complaint:
“A voice was heard upon the high places . . . weeping and supplication . . . weeping and supplication. . .”
Eva turned and left the side of M‘Crae. As she passed him she laid her hand gently on his arm.
Into the heat of the day the rumble of war-drums never ceased. Their sound contributed an uneasy background to the wanderings of James. It was no matter for surprise that his night of exposure in the forest had awakened the activities of the hosts of fever which slept in his veins. Perhaps this was a blessing; for now his body was so shaken with ague or burned with the alternate fire that the hot reality of his last horror no longer filled his brain. Eva sat beside him. In the rare intervals of lucid thought his mood was merely childish and querulous. M‘Crae, seeing that there remained for him no sphere of usefulness in the house, retired, as if by habit, to the shade of hisbanda, and began to busy himself with the notes of his book.
He wrote in a cramped and undeveloped hand, but very seriously. Even in thebandahe felt the heat of that pale sky. He wrote slowly, as one would expect of a man for whom life was infinitely spacious and leisurely, with long pauses between the sentences, in which, perhaps, he was choosing the unwilling words, or even thinking of very different things. At times, again, he would stop in the middle of a sentence, remaining painfully still, as if he were listening. He listened, but heard no sound beyond the thin, clear note of a grass country under a tropical noon. Nothing more . . . and yet a curious instinct prompted him to put out his hand for his Mannlicher, and lay it gently at his side. He went on writing again. Againstopped and listened. He was not happy. He wished now that he had kept to his post on the stoep within call of Eva in James’ room. He gave the matter a moment of serious thinking. It was a pity, he thought, that he had come into thebanda, where he could see nothing: for now there was no need of concealment, and a man was a poor creature without the use of his eyes. His ears, indeed, had been so long attuned to the condition of silence that they were quick to notice the least sound of moving beast or bird and to distinguish these from the noises which are made by men. Now he instinctively felt that men were near. In this there was nothing essentially dangerous, for Hamisi and the other boys might well be in the garden. But he knew that Eva was tied to the bedside of James, and that no African, unless he were going to steal, would enter the garden of a European, or work without being told to do so. And so he wondered, feeling curiously insecure.
He decided that it would be best for him to see for himself. He raised his body, very quietly, from the heap of sisal, and stole to the door of thebanda. By the time that he reached it he knew that he had made a mistake in leaving his rifle behind. But then it was too late. A group of armed Waluguru threw themselves upon him. They were so many that he had no chance. In a moment he was thrown to the ground with a gag in his mouth, while his arm and his legs were bound with a rope of sisal fibre. He knew that it was no use struggling. And, after all, this was neither more nor less than he had expected. The onlything which struck him as strange was the costume of these Waluguru and the arms which they carried. He couldn’t imagine that the Germans had trained such savages for police, armed them with rifles, and put them into shorts and jerseys. They dragged him along the avenue under the flamboyant trees, and in his hurried passage the events of the morning suggested to him an incredible solution. War . . . there was war. Not merely one of the black wars of Africa, but a war of white men in which his own people were engaged. The magnitude of the business, its possibilities in the wilds of Africa, overwhelmed him. He thought of Eva. . . . If he had only guessed that morning when they first heard the drums . . . if he had not been so ridiculously unimaginative. . . . But now he could do nothing.
In front of the house Godovius was awaiting him. Behind him, in orderly silence, stood another dozen of armed askaris. As the others, grunting, dragged in the body of M‘Crae, the noise of this commotion reached Eva, and she ran out on to the stoep. At first she didn’t see the bound figure of M‘Crae. She saw only Godovius—Godovius in the white uniform of the German colonial army: and the sight disturbed her, strangely enough, not so much because he was the enemy whom she dreaded most, but because he happened to be wearing the uniform which she had seen in the picture which had first frightened her in his house. “That was all I saw,” she said. “He was holding himself in the same military way, and looking so important.”
He lost no time in coming to business. He clicked his heels and saluted. “This is a serious matter, Miss Eva,” he said. “I am no longer here as your friend and neighbour, but as a soldier of Germany. The Fatherland imposes hard tasks upon us, but we have no alternative but obedience. It is only this morning that the message has reached me. Our countries are at war. This is the work of Russia and France. England, their dupe, has had the insolence to join them. It is a bad day for England in Africa. It is the end of England in Africa. Your brother and you and the man Hare are my prisoners. You will appreciate the fact that I have nothing to do with this personally. I only do my duty.”
Through this piece of deadly serious bombast Eva had stood bewildered. When he mentioned the name of Hare she came suddenly, as it were, to herself. She saw the body of M‘Crae lying bound in the dust. She saw nothing else. She wanted to see that he wasn’t hurt. She hadn’t nursed him so tenderly all those weeks for this. She saw the veins of his bound arm standing out as thick as the cords which bound them. His face was turned away from her. She hurried to his side. The askaris stood between them with their bayonets. Godovius shook his head.
“Even now I see that you do not understand. This man is a prisoner of war. However dear he may be to you, this is the fortune of war. I could not help you to your desires if I would. You will see no more of him. But even in war Germany is generous. The Germans do not make war on women or on priests.You will stay here, for the present at any rate, under my supervision. What the Government may do with you and your brother later I do not know. The man Hare will be shot. That I do know. But even so I shall not shoot him. I shall not shoot him unless you misbehave. He is your hostage with me. But you will stay here. You will give me your word that neither you nor your brother will leave the mission nor attempt to communicate with others of our enemies. I must see your brother about this. You will be good enough to lead the way.”
“You cannot see him,” she said. “He is ill, oh! very ill. He would not be able to understand you. Even I don’t understand. I can’t understand . . .”
He bowed gravely. “I am sorry to hear of your brother’s ill health. It is the night air. The night air of the swamp is very poisonous to a missionary. It was imprudent. I have noticed it before. But I will take your word.”
He bowed again, and turned to his askaris. “Chekua,” he said. “Lift . . .” They raised the lean body of M‘Crae, and set off down the hill-side. Godovius came very near to Eva, so near that she shuddered. Again the nightmare of the picture. . . . “Miss Eva,” he said, “between us there should not be war. You see the man Hare goes to my house. He may escape. . . . It is possible that he will escape . . . possible, but not probable. If he should escape, what will you give me?”
The next few days were very terrible for Eva. Perhaps it was fortunate for her that her brother needed so much attention and that his state harrowed her sufficiently to keep her mind from the greater tragedy. James made a very slow recovery, and she could not feel that she was justified in telling him of a climax in their affairs which might fall with devastating effect on a mind already torn by his adventure. Little by little he began to talk more freely of this, and always with a communicated awe. At first it seemed that he could never recover his hopes, or his faith in himself. He was far too weak to feel that he could ever return to the struggle: but in a little while he began to realise that he must make a new beginning. Then, as the fever left his body, and his mind became less perilously clear, the old impulse gradually returned, and he began to make plans for the new campaign. “This time,” he said, “I shall not be fighting in the dark. I think I know the worst. Nothing could be worse . . . nothing. If only God will give me strength. I must not be beaten. I’m only dealing with the same thing as the prophets and the early Christians. If I were not quite so utterly alone . . . And yet, if the trial is greater, so will be the triumph.”
In the end she found he could speak to her almost dispassionately of his adventure, although he never told her any details of the affair, and she knew better than to ask him. Indeed she knew very well that when hespoke to her it was really no more than a little attempt to share his trouble with another creature, to evade the utter loneliness of which he had complained, and that it didn’t matter to him whether she understood him or no. All the time it was clear that he found the whole business in retrospect rather thrilling, and even though he never once mentioned the crowning horror of the night, he talked quite frankly of small things which he remembered: of his passage of the M’ssente River under the rising moon; of the coarse grasses which had cut his fingers. Indeed he might well remember those, for his hands were still bandaged so that he could not hold a book. The ragged wound on his forehead worried him: for he could not be certain how he had come by it. “I remember nothing after a certain point,” he said. “I know it seemed to me that they were all rushing towards me. Perhaps I cried out, and they hadn’t seen me before. And yet they must have known that I was there. The hill was full of them. I just remember them all rushing towards me in the firelight. I remember how white their eyes and their teeth were. And that’s all. Yes . . . I think I must have cried out in spite of myself.”
And all the time that he spoke of these things she was thinking of M‘Crae, wondering what enormities he might be suffering in the house of Godovius. She did not realise herself how much she missed him, what a stable and reassuring element in her life he had been. She supposed that she would never see him again; and though this seemed no stranger to her thanthe fact that they had ever met, she found it difficult to reconcile herself to the prospect; for she had begun to think that nobody else in the world could possibly look after him, remembering, with the greatest tenderness, the time when he had been so dependent on her care. She had never in her life known a man so intimately as M‘Crae. She didn’t suppose that another man like him existed. The impression which she recalled most fondly was that of his absolute frankness: the desperate care which he had taken to make their relation free once and for all from anything that was not strictly true. She was thankful that it had been so. Musing on the strange story of his life, she was grateful to him for having told her so much without extenuation or pleading. She would have felt less happy if he had not cleared the way for their friendship by abandoning the name which he had worn as a disguise.
From time to time, thinking of his captivity and of what she owed him, the last words of Godovius would return to her: “If he should escape, what would you give me?” She knew exactly what that meant: and when she thought of it, even though the idea were so unspeakably horrible, she couldn’t help fancying that after all she might trick Godovius, that she might keep him to his side of the bargain and escape the fulfilment of her own, very much as she had planned to do when first he had threatened them. It seemed to her that this would be a natural thing to do: that if she could screw up her courage to a certain point she might manage to keep Godovius going and give M‘Crae at least the chance of escape. After all, it was the sortof thing that a woman could easily do. It might even be done without any too terrible risk. But always when she allowed her thoughts to turn in this direction she would find herself peculiarly conscious of the absent M‘Crae’s disapproval. She remembered how gravely he had spoken to her when she had made her last confession. “It never pays to put things off,” he had said, and even though she couldn’t persuade herself that in this case it might not pay after all, she felt that in taking so great a risk of failure and its consequences she would not be as loyal to his ideals as he would have expected her to be. And so, even though the project pestered her mind, she felt that she was bound in honour to abandon it. He wouldn’t like it, she thought, and that was enough. “I am not as good naturally as he thinks me,” she said to herself. “Not nearly as good as he is.”
Once when she was sitting beside James’ bed and thinking as usual of M‘Crae, the voice of her brother invaded her thoughts so suddenly that she found herself blushing. He said: “I’ve just remembered. . . . On the night when they brought me back there was somebody here. I asked you who it was. . . . I remember asking. And you said it was a hunter, a stranger who had turned up. You told me the name. Mac . . . Mac . . . Mackay. . . . No, it wasn’t Mackay. I get things mixed up. Who was it?”
“M‘Crae,” she said. “That was the name.”
“But what happened to him? I don’t remember. I’m sorry I didn’t see him. Where did he go?”
“He went away next day,” she said.
“I hope you made him comfortable. It’s the least one can do. Where did he go when he left us?”
“He went to Mr. Godovius’s house,” she said. It amazed her to find that it was easy to speak the truth. M‘Crae would have approved of that, she thought.
“I would have done anything to prevent him going to that house,” said James.
“Yes,” she said. “It was a pity, but it couldn’t be helped. I shouldn’t think any more about it. You were so very ill. And you couldn’t help him going there.”
“I wonder if he is staying there still,” said James.
The irony of this conversation troubled her. She felt that if she spoke another word about M‘Crae she must either go mad or tell James outright the whole story of the fugitive. “But if I did,” she thought, “he wouldn’t understand. He can’t do anything. It would only be a waste of breath.” She felt that she would like to cry.
She was so lonely and bewildered. It seemed in these days as if she couldn’t take things in. The imprisonment of M‘Crae meant so much more to her than its cause, the European War which Godovius had so impressively announced. She knew that England was at war with Germany: that she and her brother, still happily ignorant of the whole trouble, were in reality prisoners on parole: but for all that it didn’t seem to her possible that this state could alter their position in any way. Already, ever since they had been at Luguru they had been prisoners serving an indefinite term of solitary confinement. She could not realisewhat war meant to the rest of the world any more than to themselves. Eventually, and bitterly, she knew. Nothing could be very much more terrible to a woman than the prisons of Taborah; but at this time the war didn’t seem to her a thing of pressing importance: it was no more than a minor complication which might upset James if he knew of it and make his recovery slower, and the excuse—that was the way in which she regarded it—for M‘Crae’s imprisonment.
Yet, all the time, in the back of her brain, another indefinite plan was maturing. If the liberty of M‘Crae might not be purchased by the offer of a bribe which she could never bring herself to pay, there remained at least a chance—how near or how remote she was quite unable to guess—of rescuing him herself. If once she could manage to seek out the place in which he was confined, it might be possible for her to help him to escape. She remembered a few stories of this kind which she had read. Women had done such things before. They might be done again. A knife, a rifle and food, that was all that he would need. A knife was an easy thing to find; and on the very day of his capture she had taken M‘Crae’s Mannlicher from thebandaand hidden it beneath her bed.
As the days passed, and the sinister figure of Godovius failed to reappear, this plan began to take a more definite shape. She determined to make the most careful preparations for M‘Crae’s provision, and then, when everything was ready, to go herself in search of the captive’s prison. And now it seemed less necessary for her to be secret in her planning; forJames was still in his bedroom, while Hamisi and Onyango, who had disappeared together with their subordinate Waluguru on the day of M‘Crae’s arrest, had never since returned. Indeed she had been happy to find that they stayed away, for now there was no doubt in her mind but that they were in the hands of Sakharani as much as the forest people. At length, having planned the matter in detail, she decided upon a day for her adventure. It surprised her to find how little she found herself dreading the event: it seemed as if, in this particular, she had almost outgrown the possibility of fear. Her violent memory of the House of the Moon no longer disturbed her. She was even prepared to meet Godovius. Nothing mattered if only she might free M‘Crae.
The day which she chose for her attempt was the fourth after M‘Crae’s arrest. During the interval she had never left the mission compound. Now, leaving James in what seemed like a natural sleep, she left the garden in the first cool of the evening at the back of the sisal hedge by Mr. Bullace’sbanda. The bush was very quiet in this hour. The silence seemed to argue well for her success. She herself would be as quiet as the evening.
She had chosen this unusual way of leaving the mission so that she might not be seen by any lurking natives on the forest road. The smooth peak of Kilima ja Mweze still served her for a guide, and feeling that she could rely a little on her sense of direction, she had expected to enter the forest at an unusual angle and make straight for the hill itself and the house ofGodovius without ever touching the zigzag path which climbed the terraces. She stepped very quietly into the bush, and soon struck one of those tenuous paths which the goats of the Waluguru make on the hillsides where they are pastured. A matter of great luck this seemed to her: for she knew that it must surely lead directly to some village in the forest. She began to hurry, so that she might advance some way into the forest before the light failed. She ran till she lost her breath, and when she stopped and heard the beating of her own heart, she was thrilled with a delicious anticipation of success. It was all very adventurous, and her progress, so far, had seemed so secret that she couldn’t help feeling that luck was with her.
It was not long before she was disillusioned. Emerging from the path in the bush into a wider sandy lacuna, she found herself suddenly faced by Hamisi, a transfigured Hamisi, clothed in the German colonial uniform, and armed with a Mauser rifle. With him stood a second askari, one of the Waluguru whom she did not know. Both of them smiled as though they had been expecting her, showing the gap in the lower incisor teeth which the Waluguru knock out in imitation of the Masai. Hamisi saluted her, and she began to talk to him, much as a woman who talks in an ingratiating way to a dog of which she is afraid. But from the first she realised that it was no good talking. She guessed that these two men were only part of a cordon of sentries drawn about the mission, and that Godovius was relying on other thingsthan the parole which she had broken so lightly. It hadn’t struck her until that moment that she had actually broken it. In a flash she began to wonder if M‘Crae would approve. It was strange how this dour new morality of his impressed her even in this emergency.
From the first she realised that her game was up. She saw how simple she had been in underrating the carefulness of her enemy. “How he would laugh at me,” she thought. “He” was M‘Crae. She knew very well that Hamisi, for all his smiles, had orders not to let her pass. Indeed she was rather frightened of this new and militant Hamisi. She made the best of a bad job, and rated him soundly in kitchen Swahili for having left her in the lurch when the bwana was ill. . . . Hamisi scratched his back under the new jersey and smiled. He was evidently very proud of his cartridge belt and rifle and the big aluminium water-bottle which he wore slung over his shoulder.
In the failing light Eva made her way back to the mission. Rather a pathetic return after her plans and hopes. In the dim kitchen at the mission she saw the packet of food which she had prepared for M‘Crae. She had put the strips of biltong and the biscuits with a tin of sardines and a single cake of chocolate into a little linen bag. In spite of her disappointment she could almost have smiled at her own simplicity.
For all that, the failure of this enterprise opened her eyes to a great many things which she had stupidly missed. Hamisi in a burst of confidence and pride in his equipment had told her that he was nolonger a house-boy but a soldier, a soldier of Sakharani; that Sakharani was going to give him not five rupees a month but twenty; that he, being a soldier, could have as many women as he liked wherever he went, with moretembothan he could drink, andminge nyama. . . plenty of meat. It became clear to Eva that Godovius was busy raising an armed levy of the Waluguru. That was the meaning of many strange sounds which she had heard in the forest but hardly noticed before: the blowing of a bugle, and the angry stutter of rifle fire. She began remotely to appreciate what war meant: how this wretched, down-trodden people had suddenly begun to enjoy the privileges and licence of useful cannon-fodder. After that evening she was conscious all the time of this warlike activity. All day Godovius was drilling them hard, and at night she heard the rolling of the drums, and sometimes saw reflected in the sky the lights of great fires which they lighted in their camps. In the presence of this armed force she wondered however she could have been so foolish as to think that it was possible to rescue M‘Crae. She knew once and for all that the idea of succeeding in this was ridiculous. The knowledge that she and James were really prisoners began to get on her nerves. She could not imagine what would be the end of all this. She almost wished, whatever it might be, that the end would come soon. It came, indeed, sooner than she had expected.